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During the Public Sector Special Interest Group Meeting last week, some of the participants asked about the pro’s and con’s of using the Grants module. A summarization from Mark Bernard at San Diego County is provided below. He provided this information last year to the Special Interest Group. It may be useful to resend it to the distribution list for the SIG.

From Mark Bernard at San Diego County:

“Grant accounting allows users to set up revenue contracts independent from the project’s work break down structure. State and local governments have two major kinds of revenues, general purpose, such as taxes and allotments, and program revenues, such as user fees and revenue contracts, which would include federal and state grants, and other expenditure reimbursement contracts. Just about all program/ projects are funded by a mix of these kinds of revenues. In addition, a revenue contract such as a federal grant may fund multiple projects. Installing grants on top of projects has the following advantages:

• The award gives users a single point of entry to record all the terms of the revenue contract, such as the contract’s budget, the length of the contract, the allowable costs associated with the contract, attach a copy of the agreement, and define all the projects or tasks funded by that contract.
• The award also creates a single inquiry point for all costs, revenues and invoices associated with the contract. Without grants you would have to inquiry separately on each project being funded by the revenue contract.
• Awards also streamlines the billing process – for an example if a grant funds three projects, only one invoice is created containing the data from all three projects. Without grants, three invoices would be created, one for each project.
• An award manager can be defined separately from the project manager facilitating both operational control and fiduciary control – the project manager is responsible for the costs in the work breakdown structure, while award manager is responsible for all the revenues, invoices and cash.

This being said, it is true that installing awards on top of grants turns off a lot of native project functionality. It also creates complexity on applying project patches (is the patch also grant compliant?), this places grant users almost family pack behind users with projects without grants. And finally Oracle support is more robust for projects without grants than it is with projects with grants.

So welcome to the typical damned if you do and damned if don’t world of state and local setups. So either you implement projects with grants and then develop customizations for the missing project functionality. Or implement projects without grants and develop customizations for the missing grant functionality. Or maybe don’t implement projects or grants and put a project and a grant segment in the accounting flexfield and develop a custom billing extention.”

Furthermore, this documentation is useful to determine what Projects functionality is unavailable when using Grants:

Release 12.0 Grants Accounting